VanRoekel tells federal and industry execs "we should all be proud" of effort.

Share this story

US Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel told an audience of government and industry executives on Tuesday that the difficulties associated with the launch of HealthCare.gov were a "teachable moment." In comments during his keynote presentation at the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, he said, "Sometimes things just don't go the way you expect."

VanRoekel called the HealthCare.gov effort to create a national online health insurance exchange "bold" and told the audience, "We should all be proud that something this complex, this integrated to legacy systems—and there are mainframes out there that this thing hooks to—was done at Internet scale and taken online in this way," Federal Computer Week reported. "Just the fact that we have transactions moving between federal agencies using open data, using modular development, using technology in a way that moves really from a 19th- and 20th-century paper approach to an online approach is something we all should be proud of in the federal IT community."

VanRoekel's speech came just hours before the site's data center suffered another outage, rendering the system unavailable overnight. The outage continued through testimony this morning before Congress by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Secretary Sebelius said the problem was related to Verizon Terremark's data center and not the software itself, telling the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “It is the Verizon server that failed, not HealthCare.gov."

Former Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Zients, brought on by the Obama administration as a consultant to lead a "tech surge" to fix the exchange, said on October 25 that the "punch list" of problems with the site had been completed and that the site will be completely fixed by the end of November.

Share this story

Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat